Thursday, April 14, 2016

Using Telegram with Raspberry Pi

Until few months ago to communicate with my Raspberry Pi I used Yowsup that is able to connect to the Whatsapp servers.

Unfortunately this method has several issues that made me choose something different... First of all the need of a sim card or at least a phone number not used for other Whatsapp connections, the frequent changes on the Whatsapp protocol and so to the Yowsup libraries that force you to always check for them and eventually update the software and your scripts also on the RPi and least but not last the fact that Whatsapp do not like that their servers are used with a software that is not their messenger!

There are several different solutions to communicate with a RPi. One that I'm using is Pushover, but it's just a one way system (from RPi to the smartphone). It works quite well if you just need text notifications, but if you need something really like Whatsapp the solution could be Telegram.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Fish tank and Raspberry Pi

First of all, sorry if lately my posts are published less often than before, but I'm quite busy with several other things and my time for hobbies is quite limited...

Today I will show you a project made for request.

One friend have a small fish tank and he wished to make a really small system, just to check the temperature, pilot lights and few other things .

One Raspberry Pi model A+ was perfect to manage the fish tank with those features, so I decided to start this project and I finished it in few days.

Now this system has been named Aquarius and it's working as it was requested, with some small addition made by myself.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Adding a sensor zone to Sphaera

My Sphaera project is  nice and useful when used alone, but I designed it to be expandable quite easily by adding more Raspberry Pis to the LAN

Also, with the new extremely low cost Raspberry Pi Zero You can add several expansions at an affordable price without sacrifying system performance, as this new board has the same performances of an A+ model.

In this article I will show you just one example of configuration, but adding a new Raspberry Pi would be almost the same for any number of them.

It will be a short and surely not complete description, but could give you a starting point for building something similar. Anyway if you have some question about it, just ask.